Question

I'm finally putting my TwikiSite back together after the server was hacked & root-kitted. Yikes! It's been a year since the machine went down because I just didn't have time. Now it seems such a daunting task to catch back up with the current state of twiki.org (because the progress is so fast & furious !!! congratulations !!)

My old twiki (CairoRelease) is up and running now from inside of a chroot jail. Everything is working correctly, except I notice tonight that show diffs isn't behaving.

Symptoms

Each topic shows that it is revision 1.1 and was last edited by TWikiGuest. But curiously, it does show the date and time of the last edit correctly. For example :

r1.1 - 20 Mar 2005 - 21:12 - TWikiGuest

I've looked through the discussions at NoDiffsFromRdiff and DiffProblem, but to no avail. Re-installing RCS seems like a great option, but running twiki from within a chroot jail complicates matters a bit. I can't install RCS into the jail location because of the error: package rcs is not relocatable

Everything worked correctly for this same twiki on the same server in the past (but now we have a fresh install of the operating system). Whatever the problem now, it is almost certainly due to running from inside of the chroot jail. I'll do my best to explain the setup below. Any questions, please do ask

Settings & Environment

testenv

• testenv.htm
  • the PATH_INFO: /foo/bar test works correctly
  • the $pubUrlPath: /twiki/pub test works correctly
  • the RCS relinking ran correctly

From TWiki.cfg

   $rcsDir = '/usr/bin';

   $rcsArg =  ($OS eq "WINDOWS") ? "-x,v" : "" ;

   diffCmd       => "$rcsDir/rcsdiff $rcsArg -q -w -B -r%REVISION1% -r%REVISION
2% $keywordMode --unified=%CONTEXT% %FILENAME% $endRcsCmd",

Steps taken so far ..

I did try re-locking the RCS files using the easy re-lock link from testenv

Observations ...

RCS seems to be working correctly. That is, the new versions are being stored to the .txt,v file. I've demonstrated this with a simple test :

1. create and save a new topic in the Sandbox web
2. check that .txt,v file is also created along with the new topic file at the OS level :
   • -r--r--r--   1 user group   520 Jun 17 02:50 TestTopic19.txt,v
   • -rw-r--r--   1 user group   330 Jun 17 02:50 TestTopic19.txt
3. add a large amount of text to that new topic and save
4. check that the RCS .txt,v file grows in size :
   • -r--r--r--   1 user group   5825 Jun 17 02:51 TestTopic19.txt,v
   • -rw-r--r--   1 user group   5215 Jun 17 02:51 TestTopic19.txt

I don't know the intricate details of using RCS from the command line or I would run some other tests against the .txt,v files. But even from this simple test, I'm fairly comfortable that the .txt,v files do contain the correct revision information.

So the problem seems to be only with displaying that revision information and with displaying the differences between revs.

Thoughts, musings, questions, ... answers ?

If you have any input whatsoever, please do share. My twiki was only just recently brought back to life and it's already being used for projects.

... a twiki without RCS is a bit like superman without his

Environment

-- KeithHelfrich - 17 Jun 2006

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

Keith: did you consider switching from RscWrap to RcsLite ?

RcsLite is a re-implementation of rcs for when you have no rcs.....

-- SvenDowideit - 17 Jun 2006

wow, what a solution ! I've switched to RcsLite by changing one line im my TWiki.cfg and now I can see my diffs !

Thanks Sven, that's great.

Now that I can see the diffs, the first thing I notice is that for topics that were edited during the recent period when the twiki was running inside the jail with traditional RCS, there was seemingly a new revision created for every topic save.

So, for example, a topic that is two days old already has 77 revisions, even though only one or two folks have made lasting changes. So it seems that in addition to the view diffs functionality, the check-out check-in was also working incorrectly with tradditional RCS from inside the chroot jail.

A few quick tests now that I've switched to RcsLite seem to indicate that this funkiness is resolved as well.

So that is to say :: so far so good, thanks for the quick fix.

-- KeithHelfrich - 18 Jun 2006